The Epic of Gilgamesh - Anonymous [10]
Ishtar (Sumerian Inanna) was worshipped in the great temple in Uruk, together with Anu. She is the queen of heaven, and as goddess of love and of war an equivocal character; ‘an awful and lovely goddess’ like Aphrodite. Most of the gods had both a benign and a dangerous aspect, even Shamash could be terrible; but in this poem, except for a single moment, we see Ishtar only in her darker character. That she could be gracious is shown by a hymn of about 1600 B.C. ‘Reverence the queen of women, the greatest of all the gods; she is clothed with delight and with love, she is full of ardour, enchantment, and voluptuous joy, in her lips she is sweet, in her mouth is Life, when she is present felicity is greatest; how glorious she looks, the veils thrown over her head, her lovely form, her brilliant eyes.’ This is the radiant goddess of love as she first appeared to Gilgamesh, but her aspect very soon altered to become that of the familiar ‘lady of sorrows and of battles’. In this character she is addressed in a hymn from Babylon: ‘Oh, star of lamentation, brothers at peace together you cause to fight one another, and yet you give constant friendship. Mighty one, lady of battles who overturns mountains.’
The only remaining god to play an important part in the poem is Ea (Sumerian Enki), the god of wisdom, whose particular element was the sweet waters bringing life to the land, and whose house was at Eridu, which was then on the Persian Gulf. He appears as a benign being, a peace-maker, but not always a reliable friend, for, like so many exponents of primitive wisdom, he enjoyed tricks and subterfuges and on occasion was not devoid of malice. But here he acts as the great ‘lord of wisdom who lives in the deep’. His origins are obscure, but he is sometimes called the son of Anu, ‘Begotten in his own image ... of broad understanding and mighty strength.’ He was also in a particular degree the creator and benefactor of mankind.
Over against heaven and its gods lies the underworld with its sombre deities. In the old Sumerian myth of creation, already referred to, after An had carried off the heavens and taken possession of the firmament and after Enlil had carried off the earth, then Ereshkigal was borne away by the Underworld for its prize (or perhaps was given the underworld for her prize). The meaning of the myth is obscure, but this part of it seems to describe another rape of Persephone. Ereshkigal was sometimes called the elder sister of Ishtar, and possibly herself once a sky-goddess who became the queen of the underworld; but for her there was no spring-time return to earth.
The Sumerian name for the underworld, ‘Kur’, also meant mountain and foreign land, and there is often considerable ambiguity in its use. The underworld was beneath the earth’s surface but above the nether waters, the great abyss. The way to it was ‘into the mountain’, but there were many circumlocutions for the place itself and for the way down. It was ‘the road of the chariot’ and ‘the road of no-return’; nor are we ourselves so unlike the Sumerians in this respect, as can be proved by comparing the relative length of the entries under ‘Life’ and ‘Death’ in the English Thesaurus.
Later on, the old story of the rape (if such it was) seems to have been forgotten or to have lost its importance, and with it was lost the personality of ‘Kur’; for, as with Hades, the grim god became little more than a dark place, while Ereshkigal is given other husbands. The Queen of the Underworld is an altogether terrifying being who is never more than obliquely described: ‘She who rests, she who rests, the mother of Ninazu, her holy shoulders are not covered with garments, her breast is not covered with linen.’ There are several poems, both Sumerian and Semitic, that describe the underworld. Sometimes it is the scene of a journey taken by a goddess or a mortal. A certain Assyrian prince, under the pseudonym of ‘Kummu’, has left a horrifying vision of death and the hereafter. It is a dark apocalypse in which